Factories for munitions production

As for the possible use of chemical weapons during operations in North Africa, climatic conditions accentuated one of the principal limitations of offensive chemical warfare, namely its dependence on the weather. No doubt, weapons intended for desert conditions could have been developed, but there was no great pressure to do so. The British, however, did maintain chemical warfare depots in Egypt, but the threat of enemy retaliation in kind against the United Kingdom provided an overriding sanction against their use. 

The United States had never ratified the Geneva Protocol, but nevertheless, President Roosevelt considered poison gas a barbarous weapon. Indeed, he had no intention, unlike his British counterpart, of authorising its use, much to the disappointment of the American Chemical Warfare Service. The American chemical weapons programme only thrived because of the fear of Japanese chemical warfare efforts indeed, American newspapers often printed reports of Japanese use of chemical warfare against the Chinese. Despite his reservations, Roosevelt issued a 

Had chemical warfare been initiated on any of the occasions discussed in this chapter, it could have been said that there were sound military reasons, in the short term, for doing so. The possible effect of chemical warfare on enemy morale was certainly appreciated within military circles. In Germany the view was not only that the demoralising effect of gas was likely to be far greater than that of any other means of combat, but also that the effect on the human psyche was of greater importance than the ability of gas to produce casualties. The foundations of this doctrine had been laid in lectures given by Fritz Haber in 1924  

All modern means of combat, although they appear intended to kill the enemy, actually owe their success to the intensity with which they affect the psychic stability of the enemy... which in a decisive moment, induce the enemy to lose the will to fight and feel deflated... Life in a trench subject to direct hit or cave-in is a terrific strain on human nerves, but the experience of war has taught us that the strain becomes tolerable... Exactly the reverse is true of the 

Haber was speaking principally about the battlefield use of gas, but his remarks could also be applied to the use of gas against civilians. It could be argued that given the sensational accounts of the effects of gas that had been appearing in the European press in the inter-war period, there was a considerable probability that a gas attack on a city would produce an effect on civilian morale out of all proportion to the weight of weapons used. 

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